


hello darkness, my old friend

by griffenly



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-06
Updated: 2015-06-06
Packaged: 2018-04-03 04:14:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4086268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/griffenly/pseuds/griffenly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She has hair of gold and a crown of flowers circling her head, and he is the god of the dead. </p><p>or, a Hades/Persephone AU</p>
            </blockquote>





	hello darkness, my old friend

**Author's Note:**

> This was based off an anonymous prompt request from tumblr, and I really enjoyed writing it so I hope you enjoy reading it!

The first time he sees her, it goes a bit like this: 

She’s surrounded by flowers of all shapes and sizes and colors, all golden-hair and blue, blue eyes, and he is enamored almost immediately. He knows who she is, of course, the daughter of the goddess of the harvest, the goddess of nature.   
She builds herself a crown of flowers, and he calls her Princess in his mind.

But with her crown atop her head and a coldness in her eyes, he watches her pluck the fragile petals, breaking them as she goes, watching their fractured pieces fall to the ground like broken-winged fairies. He sees death in her fingertips, and he wonders what happened to her, to make darkness crowd the body of the goddess of the earth. 

He watches her, day in and day out. He watches and he takes note, because she is an enigma, his princess. (When did she become his? When did he claim her for his own, in his heart?) She follows her mother around dutifully, but it is obedience, not want, that is carved into her movements. He wants to rescue her from this fate, but he doesn’t quite know how.   
She catches him one day.

She catches him and it feels like he is swallowing glass, like his lungs are filled up with everything but air, and he doesn’t quite know what to do. He’s the god of the Underworld, and he is left powerless at the ends of this petite blonde tempest. (She is a storm, he can see. A hurricane, all tumultuous winds and unbridled anger, and he wants to let her drown him in her waves.)   
“You’ve been watching me,” she says, and she doesn’t sound worried or confused or even upset. It is merely fact. 

“Yes,” he responds, and he keeps his voice even. He is proud of this. 

“Why?” Her head is cocked to the side, a little furrow between her brow. She has a dark mark above her upper lip, and he wants to trace it. He wants to memorize the curves of her face with his fingertips, to learn every individual color of her irises. (She is a storm, and he is ready to drown.) 

“Does it bother you?” he asks instead of answering, and he takes a hesitant step forward. She doesn’t move, and there’s a ghost of a grin hovering at the corner of her lips, as though she wants to smile but isn’t quite sure how. As though she had been taught, once, but the lesson had faded with lack of use. He takes another step. 

“No,” she tells him easily, and there’s a challenge in the gleam of her eye. 

Another step. 

“Good.” He’s right in front of her, now, but he doesn’t move any further. They stand there, facing each other, and he wonders how this looks, objectively. He, the god of the Underworld, the physical manifestation of darkness itself - all jagged edges, cloaked in shadows - and she, the goddess of the earth, the bringer of beauty and life and springtime - with her hair like woven sunlight and her outer softness. They are contradictory beings, she and him.

And yet he can’t help feeling that they are two sides of the same coin, spun from the same cloth.   
Her fingers ghost across the skin of his wrist, and he can feel the blood caked beneath her fingernails that she is too terrified to mention. 

They do this for some time, sitting in her beds of flowers, telling stories and passing the time until he must reopen the ground and slip down into the dankness of his own home. He tells her of the people he rules over, of their plights and their servitudes, and of the way he feels when he can hear their screams reverberating along the cavernous walls. She tells him of the rush of air that blows through her veins when she grants a wilted flower new life, and of the machete-laced words her mother throws at her, of the shackles that the goddess of the harvest has locked around her daughter’s thin wrists.   
“I’m just so tired,” she says, and her head is pillowed on his shoulder. He closes his eyes, because he is only the ruler of the dead, and he has no right interfering in the lives of those who create life. (He wants so much to right these wrongs done unto his princess.) 

“You could come with me,” he murmurs into her hair, and she freezes beneath him, her fingers stilling where they were playing with his own. “You could... could rule with me. Every king needs a queen.” 

He can hear the smile in her voice when she whispers, “I thought you called me Princess.”   
“Well,” he says around a grin, “old nicknames die hard.” 

She moves to look at him, that furrow back between her brows, and he reaches up to smooth it out, the pad of his thumb ghosting across delicate flesh. She softens beneath him, her eyes turning to the molten blue of the oceans at sunrise, to the color of the forget-me-not flowers she had once conjured out of thin air. 

“Take me with you,” she whispers, and he thinks this is the moment he hands his bleeding heart into her small hands. (He hopes she can eradicate the darkness like she does with most everything else.) 

They go, he and his princess, into the depths of the Underworld, her fingers entangled with his, so much so that he cannot tell where she ends and he begins. (He likes it better this way.) They stumble through the entrance, and he shows her his home, a nervousness creeping up the back of his neck, because what if she doesn’t like it here? What if she leaves? What if, what if, what if?  
But there’s a smile on her petal-pink lips and a twinkle in her eye that he thought had long-since been forced away, and when she looks at him, he thinks this may be what Zeus feels like as he rules Olympus, high up there in the soft clouds.   
She kisses him for the first time, and she tastes like summer rain and ashes, and he wonders how no one else sensed the darkness lurking just beneath the surface.

She sleeps curled into his body, as though to be separated would mean death, as though she instinctually gravitates towards him, even in her dreaming state. Her breath ghosts across the skin of his chest, and it makes fire curdle in his veins, hot and visceral and needy, and he wonders how he was ever able to be without this. 

Her mother is not pleased, and she rants and cries and sends the earth into a tailspin of death and destruction. (He wonders how no one ever saw the darkness in her, either. How the goddess of life could have so easily transitioned into the goddess of death without anyone noticing.) 

And his princess - oh, his beautiful princess - how she worries. She tucks her bottom lip between her teeth with anguish carved into her irises, and he wants to suck the pain out of them, wants to kiss her until she can't taste the cold, stale air that permeates the atmosphere, now. 

(He worries she will leave him, and he will be a fractured half of an incomplete whole.) 

But his princess is beautiful and brilliant, and she smiles gently at him as she plucks a pomegranate from the tree, breaking it in two. She pulls the seeds out gently with nimble fingers. 

“Six,” she says, and she swallows them all in one go. “Six with you, six with her.” 

He stares, because she doesn’t want to leave, she wants to stay - she wants to stay and rule and stay and be with him.  
“Six,” he repeats, and her answering smile tugs one upon his own lips. 

When she kisses him, it tastes like a promise. “May we meet again,” she murmurs against his lips, and he thinks it sounds like a vow.   
He waits for her, ruling on his own. He can do this without her, he knows - he has done it for so long, now - but he also knows he is biding his time. Biding his time until she returns to him, until she is back in his arms, seated at her matching throne with her crown atop her head. 

(She returns, and she smells like flower petals and tastes like soot, and she is no different than before. He smiles.) 

She takes her place beside him, sitting tall and proud with fire in her veins and ice in her glare. She glances at him, offers him a smile, and says, “Together.” 

He doesn’t hear the screams of the anguished quite so loudly anymore.


End file.
